GOVERNMENT is both a fact and
a right. Its origin as a fact, is simply a question of history; its origin as a
right or authority to govern, is a question of ethics. Whether a certain
territory and its population are a sovereign state or nation, or not —
whether the actual ruler of a country is its rightful ruler, or not — is
to be determined by the historical facts in the case; but whence the government
derives its right to govern, is a question that can be solved only by
philosophy, or, philosophy failing, only by revelation.

Political writers, not carefully distinguishing between the fact and the
right, have invented various theories as to the origin of government, among
which may be named —

I. Government originates in the right of the father to govern
his child.

II. It originates in convention, and is a social compact.

III. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are sovereign.

IV. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.

V. It derives its right from the immediate and express appointment of God;
—

VI. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual society;
—

VII. From God through the people; —

VIII. From God through the natural law.

I. The first theory is sound, if the question is confined to the origin of
government as a fact. The patriarchal system is the earliest known system of
government, and unmistakable traces of it are found in nearly all known
governments — in the tribes of Arabia and Northern Africa, the
Irish septs and the Scottish clans, the Tartar hordes, the
Roman gentes, and the Russian and Hindoo villages. The right of
the father was held to be his right to govern his family or household, which,
with his children, included his wife and servants. From the family to the tribe
the transition is natural and easy, as also from the tribe to the nation. The
father is chief of the family; the chief of the eldest family is chief of the
tribe; the chief of the eldest tribe becomes chief of the nation, and, as such,
king or monarch. The heads of families collected in a senate form an
aristocracy, and the families themselves, represented by their delegates, or
publicly assembling for public affairs, constitute a democracy. These three
forms, with their several combinations, to wit, monarchy, aristocracy,
democracy, and mixed governments, are all the forms known to Aristotle, and
have generally been held to be all that are possible.

Historically, all governments have, in some sense, been developed from the
patriarchal, as all society has been developed from the family. Even those
governments, like the ancient Roman and the modern feudal, which seem to be
founded on landed property, may be traced back to a patriarchal origin. The
patriarch is sole proprietor, and the possessions of the family are vested in
him, and he governs as proprietor as well as father. In the tribe, the chief is
the proprietor, and in the nation, the king is the landlord, and holds the
domain. Hence, the feudal baron is invested with his fief by the suzerain,
holds it from him, and to him it escheats when forfeited or vacant. All the
great Asiatic kings of ancient or modern times hold the domain and govern as
proprietors; they have the authority of the father and the owner; and their
subjects, though theoretically their children, are really their slaves.

In Rome, however, the proprietary right undergoes an important
transformation. The father retains all the power of the patriarch within his
family, the patrician in his gens or house, but, outside of it, is met
and controlled by the city or state. The heads of houses are united in the
senate, and collectively constitute and govern the state. Yet, not all the
heads of houses have seats in the senate, but only the tenants of the sacred
territory of the city, which has been surveyed and marked by the god Terminus.
Hence the great plebeian houses, often richer and nobler than the patrician,
were excluded from all share in the government and the honors of the state,
because they were not tenants of any portion of the sacred territory. There is
here the introduction of an element which is not patriarchal, and which
transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the city or state, and founds
the civil order, or what is now called civilization. The city or state takes
the place of the private proprietor, and territorial rights take the place of
purely personal rights.

In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the man the land.
When land was transferred to a new tenant, the practice in early times was to
bury him in it, in order to indicate that it took possession of him, received,
accepted, or adopted him; and it was only such persons as were taken possession
of, accepted or adopted by the sacred territory or domain that, though denizens
of Rome, were citizens with full political rights. This, in modern language,
means that the state is territorial, not personal, and that the citizen
appertains to the state, not the state to the citizen. Under the patriarchal,
the tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, there is, properly speaking,
no state, no citizens, and the organization is economical rather than
political. Authority — even the nation itself — is personal, not
territorial. The patriarch, the chief of the tribe, or the king, is the only
proprietor. Under the Gręco-Roman system all this is transformed. The
nation is territorial as well as personal, and the real proprietor is the city
or state. Under the Empire, no doubt, what lawyers call the eminent domain was
vested in the emperor, but only as the representative and trustee of the city
or state.

When or by what combination of events this transformation was effected,
history does not inform us. The first-born of Adam, we are told, built a city,
and called it after his son Enoch; but there is no evidence that it was
constituted a municipality. The earliest traces of the civil order
proper are found in the Greek and Italian republics, and its fullest and
grandest developments are found in Rome, imperial as well as republican. It was
no doubt preceded by the patriarchal system, and was historically developed
from it, but by way of accretion, rather than by simple explication, It has in
it an element that, if it exists in the patriarchal constitution, exists there
only in a different form, and. the transformation marks the passage from the
economical order to the political, from the barbaric to the civil constitution
of society, or from barbarism to civilization.

The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived from
civitas — city or state. The Greeks and Romans call all tribes and
nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as distinguished from the
state, barbarians. The origin of the word barbarian, barbarus, or
barbaroV, is unknown, and its primary sense can be
only conjectured. Webster regards its primary sense as foreign, wild, fierce;
but this could not have been its original sense; for the Greeks and Romans
never termed all foreigners barbarians, and they applied the term to nations
that bad no inconsiderable culture and refinement of manners, and that had made
respectable progress in art and science — as the Indians, Persians,
Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, They applied the term evidently in a
political, not an ethical or an ęsthetical sense, and as it would seem to
designate a social order in which the state was not developed, and in which the
nation was personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private
right, not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or
tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others barbarians.

Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the-modern European sense, but to
monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense. Lacedęmon had kings; yet it
was no less republican than Athens; and Rome was called and was a republic
under the emperors no less than under the consuls. Republic, respublica,
by the very force of the term, means the public wealth, or, in good English,
the commonwealth; that is, government founded not on personal or private
wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory, or domain, or a government
that vests authority in the nation, and attaches the nation to a certain
definite territory. France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great
Britain in substance though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of the
word, republican states; for the king or emperor does not govern in his own
private right, but solely as representative of the power and majesty of the
state. The distinctive mark of republicanism is the substitution of the state
for the personal chief, and public authority for personal or private right.
Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to barbarism, and all civility,
in the old sense of the word, or civiltą in Italian, is
republican, and is applied in modern times to breeding, or refinement of
manners, simply because these are characteristics of a republican, or polished
[from poliV, city] people. Every people that has a
real civil order, or a fully developed state or polity, is a republican people;
and hence the church and her great doctors, when they speak of the state as
distinguished from the church, call it the republic, as may be seen by
consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius IX., which some have interpreted
wrongly in an anti-republican sense.

All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains, or is
developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really so regarded by all
Christendom. In civilized nations the patriarchal authority is transformed into
that of the city or state, that is, of the republic; but in all barbarous
nations it retains its private and personal character. The nation is only the
family or tribe, and is called by the name of its ancestor, founder, or chief,
not by a geographical denomination. Race has not been supplanted by country;
they are a people, not a state. They are not fixed to the soil, and though we
may find in them ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never find
among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so distinguished the
Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among modern Christian nations. They
have a family, a race, a chief or king, but no patria, or country. The
barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire, whether of the West or the East,
were nations, or confederacies of nations, but not states. The nation with them
was personal, not territorial. Their country was wherever they fed their flocks
and herds, pitched their tents, and encamped for the night. There were Germans,
but no German state, and even to-day the German finds his
"father-land" wherever the German speech is spoken. The Polish,
Sclavonian, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by German
states, in which the German language is not the mother-tongue, are excluded
from the Germanic Confederation. The Turks, or Osmanlis, are a race, not a
state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of the Eastern Roman or Greek
Empire.

Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic, pastoral, or
predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and Persians or modern Chinese, and
have their geographical boundaries, they have still no state, no country. The
nation defines the boundaries, not the boundaries the nation. The nation does
not belong to the territory, but the territory to the nation or its chief. The
Irish and Anglo-Saxons, In former times, held the land in gavelkind, and the
territory belonged to the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as
indivisible, they still held it as private property. The shah of Persia holds
the whole Persian territory as private property, and the landholders among his
subjects are held to be his tenants. They hold it from him, not from the
Persian state. The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private
domain of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan. There is in barbaric states no
republic, no commonwealth; authority is parental, without being tempered by
parental affection. The chief is a despot, and rules with the unlimited
authority of the father and the harshness of the proprietor. He owns the land
and his subjects.

Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of the Roman
Empire, however modified by the Church and by reminiscences of
Gręco-Roman civilization retained by the conquered, was a barbaric
constitution, The feudal monarch, as far as he governed at all, governed as
proprietor or landholder, not as the representative of the commonwealth. Under
feudalism there are estates, but no state. The king governs as an estate, the
nobles hold their power as an estate, and the commons are represented as an
estate. The whole theory of power is, that it is an estate; a private right,
not a public trust. It is not without reason, then, that the common sense of
civilized nations terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous
ages.

It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric constitutions,
and yet as it is defended by many stanch democrats, especially European
democrats and revolutionists, and by French and Germans settled in our own
country, it is essentially barbaric and anti-republican. The characteristic
principle of barbarism is, that power is a private or personal right, and when
democrats assert that the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that
it is held by virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the
fundamental principle of barbarism and despotism. This says nothing in favor of
restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal suffrage. To restrict
suffrage to property-holders helps nothing, theoretically or practically.
Property has of itself advantages enough, without clothing its holders with
exclusive political rights and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are
as trustworthy as the business classes. The wise statesman will never restrict
suffrage, or exclude the poorer and more numerous classes from all voice in the
government of their country. General suffrage is wise, and if Louis Philippe
had had the sense to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation to the support
of his government, he would never have had to encounter the revolution of 1848.
The barbarism, the despotism, is not in universal suffrage, but in defending
the elective franchise as a private or personal right. It is not a private, but
a political right, and, like all political rights, a public trust. Extremes
meet, and thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the head of the
human race and lead the civilization of the age, are really in principle
retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or taking their place with nations
on whom the light of civilization has never yet dawned. All is not gold that
glisters.

The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a private or
personal right; and the characteristic of civilization is, that it makes it a
public trust. Barbarism knows only persons; civilization asserts and maintains
the state, With barbarians the authority of the patriarch is developed simply
by way of explication; in civilized states it is developed by way of
transformation. Keeping in mind this distinction, it may be maintained that all
systems of government, as a simple historical fact, have been developed from
the patriarchal. The patriarchal has preceded them all, and it is with the
patriarchal that the human race has begun its career. The family or household
is not a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and, historically
considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well as the initial or inchoate
nation. But its simple direct development gives us barbarism, or what is called
Oriental despotism, and which nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom. It
is found only in pagan and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in the secular
order is republican, and continues and completes the work of Greece and Rome.
It meets with little permanent success in any patriarchal or despotic nation,
and must either find or create civilization, which has been developed from the
patriarchal system by way of transformation.

But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of government, and
all governments have been developed or modified from it, the right of
government to govern cannot be deduced from the right of the father to govern
his children, for the parental right itself is not ultimate or complete. All
governments that assume it to be so, and rest on it as the foundation of their
authority, are barbaric or despotic, and, therefore, without any legitimate
authority. The right to govern rests on ownership or dominion. Where there is
no proprietorship, there is no dominion; and where there is no dominion, there
is no right to govern. Only he who is sovereign proprietor is sovereign lord.

Property, ownership, dominion rests on creation. The maker has the right to
the thing made. He, so far as he is sole creator, is sole proprietor, and may
do what he will with it God is sovereign lord and proprietor of the universe,
because He is its sole creator. He hath the absolute dominion, because He is
absolute master. He has made it, He owns it; and one may do what he will with
his own. His dominion is absolute, because He is absolute creator, and He
rightly governs as absolute and universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He
exercises only His sovereign light, and His own essential wisdom, goodness,
justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all conceivable
guaranties that His exercise of His power will always be right, wise, just, and
good. The despot is a man attempting to be God upon earth, and to exercise a
usurped power. Despotism is based on the parental right, and the parental right
is assumed to be absolute. Hence, your despotic rulers claim to reign, and to
be loved and worshipped as gods, Even the Roman emperors, in the fourth and
fifth centuries, were addressed as divinities; and Theodosius the Great, a
Christian, was addressed as "Your Eternity," Eternitas vestras
— so far did barbarism encroach on civilization, even under Christian
emperors.

The right of the father over his child is an imperfect right, for he is the
generator, not the creator of his child. Generation is in the order of second
causes, and is simply the development or explication of the race. The early
Roman law, founded on the confusion of generation with creation, gave the
father absolute authority over the child — the right of life and death, as
over his servants or slaves; but this was restricted under the Empire, and in
all Christian nations the authority of the father is treated, like all power,
as a trust. The child, like the father himself, belongs to the state, and to
the state the father is answerable for the use he makes of his authority. The
law fixes the age of majority, when the child is completely emancipated; and
even during his nonage, takes him from the father and places him under
guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil or grossly abuses his
trust, This is proper, because society contributes to the life of the child,
and has a right as well as an interest in him. Society, again, must suffer if
the child is allowed to grow up a worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a
right to intervene, both in behalf of itself and of the child, in case his
parents neglect to train him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or
are training him up to be a liar, a thief, a drunkard, a murderer, a pest to
the community, How, then, base the right of society on the right of the father,
since, in point of fact, the right of society is paramount to the right of the
parent?

But even waiving this, and granting what is not the fact, that the authority
of the father is absolute, unlimited, it cannot be the ground of the right of
society to govern. Assume the parental right to be perfect and inseparable from
the parental relation, it is no right to govern where no such relation exists.
Nothing true, real, solid in government can be founded on what Carlyle calls a
"sham." The statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains and conforms
to the realities, the verities of things; and all jurisprudence that accepts
legal fictions is imperfect, and even censurable. The presumptions or
assumptions of law or politics must have a real and solid basis, or they are
inadmissible. How, from the right of the father to govern his own child, born
from his loins, conclude his right to govern one not his child? Or how, from my
right to govern my child, conclude the right of society to found the state,
institute government, and exercise political authority over its members?